


Forks Are Too Straight

by StevetheIcecube



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Everyone Is Gay, Everyone is Asexual, Gen, Mute Link, Nonbinary Sheik, Sheik and Zelda are different people, Trans Man Link
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2018-07-22 18:49:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7450162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StevetheIcecube/pseuds/StevetheIcecube
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Due to a mishap (people being awful), Zelda ends up in a girl's room with a boy and Sheik, who is Sheik and not a girl, thank you. Administration thought this was a good idea, but it turns out that the three of them get on way too well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Arrival

Link pulled a face as he looked up at the huge building ahead of him. Boring, boring, rich people, capitalism. The building looked fancy, his rich parents sent their problematic child to a new boarding school to get him to feel gratitude for how rich they were, the school got money for suppressing his creativity and used the money to make the building look more fancy and attract more rich people to it. It went round and round and he knew it and he hated it. He hated rich people and their stupid standards and their stupid leg shaving ideas and their stupid stupid cis boarding schools.

"What do you think, honey?" His mother had this stupid sickly sweet rich person voice on because they were out in vaguely public.

'It's ugly,' he signed, and he sighed loudly for as long as he could while she took a long time to mentally translate what he'd said. Honestly, if she just took some more sign language lessons she'd make up the time almost instantly. But she didn't really care about communicating with him, so he had to put up with the internet explorer-esque delays.

"No it isn't, sweetie, you just don't like it," she said. She was starting to look irritated, for goddess's sake, it had only been ten minutes since she'd taken a break from talking to him for the explicit purpose of being less irritated. "Give this a chance. I know you're intelligent, and this is a good school with good teachers. I don't want to hear any more of this boy thing, you hear me?"

He sighed again and didn't dignify her comments with a response. He knew he was smart and he was sure this school paid its teachers a lot of money to do their jobs properly and not molest the students, but the latter definitely still happened so he doubted that the first would be done.

He put his shoes on to get ready to get out of the car. He couldn't wait to be out of here and into a place where he wouldn't have to tolerate talking to his mother. She just didn't have the parenting skills to understand him well enough to take care of him properly. It wasn't anything new, it was just a new wave of disappointment every second he spent in her presence. Now he was thinking about it, boarding schools probably were better than the alternative.

As soon as the car stopped, he got out with a very quick wave to his mother and ran round to the back to get his case before anyone could offer to help him. He wanted to go in by himself because he didn't want his mother or the driver trying to speak over him. That's what people did whenever they were in his presence, it wasn't just them. They liked to talk instead of him because they could do it better than him, even though they couldn't speak for him. They damn well tried to though, and they failed more frequently than he got As. And he got those constantly.

It turned out that dragging a big and heavy pull along case across a gravel driveway full of expensive cars was really difficult, and Link didn't know why he was surprised. It was like this basically every year. He could try, though. It was hard and people kept staring at him (they were probably staring because of the bright pink case though, courtesy of his mother), but he eventually made it to the doors of his latest bourgeois prison. There, an overachiever in an expensive suit offered to show him to his room so he could take his case up there before going to get something to eat. Link was tempted to be terrible and ask him if there was room in his bed, but he'd tried that one two years ago and he hadn't really liked it. It wasn't really any fun.

"What's your surname then, mister…" Link wanted to jump for joy, but he didn't, because here came about two thirds of the battle.

'I can't speak,' he signed, not expecting the slightly spotty boy to understand the sign language, so he followed up the blank look he received with a motion to his mouth before shaking his head.

"Ah, yes, okay." The boy looked uncomfortable and spotty now, and Link delighted in that. "Well, I have a list, if you could find your name?" That was a rather fast recovery for someone who looked like he had no sense. Link almost admired him for it.

He scanned the list, unsurprised to find the wrong name. They better not have gone against his wishes, though. He'd asked and he'd gone through a long email discussion for this. He sighed, took a deep breath mentally and then pointed to his name.

The change, of course, was instant. "Oh, I'm so incredibly sorry Miss Faron! I apologise, I didn't mean to mistake who you were…" He hadn't been mistaken, but it wasn't like he could correct the boy or anything. Right first time, but now wrong for the foreseeable future. It was infuriating and Link was really starting to wish he'd caved and resorted to pen and paper despite his pride. He had a damn language and it wasn't his fault that no one could speak it. It was their fault.

Link then had to stand through a stream of apologies as the boy just wouldn't shut up as he showed Link up to his rooms. With a heavy (and furious) heart and an incredibly sick feeling in his stomach, Link noted where the rooms split off with girls on the right and boys on the left. And he was on the right. He'd spent hours trying to carefully compose emails to administration about this. He'd explained his rights and his safety and everything and they'd just ignored it, probably because of something his mother had said. A thought briefly crossed his mind of never speaking to her again, and it made him laugh a little, though not out loud.

"Here you go!" He said, a cheerful smile pasted on his face. "After you've put your bag down you can go down the stairs at the end of the corridor for your tour with your roommates." Joy of joys, maybe he'd tag along with someone else because he didn't fancy talking to some girls right now, especially not rich stranger girls.


	2. Meeting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Link goes to meet with his new room mates.

The room they were all meeting up in was crowded and nasty. There were so many disgustingly rich and sweaty teenagers all standing in a vague circle, trying to work out who was the richest and who had the most influence over the rest of them. Hence, who would be the best target to make friends with. Link just stood there hoping that no one bothered to talk to him. Rich people were awful and he hated being one. His dearest mother always said that he should be grateful for what he had because he might never have to work a day in his life, and he owed that to the 'hard work' of his parents. Except his parents hadn't done anything, because they'd been brought up being told that they'd never have to work a day in their lives. And they didn't. They paid other people to do all the work for them and then they got most of the reward.

Link liked to think that his awkward existence was a form of karma that was punishing his parents for being shitty rich people, because they found him endlessly irritating. They hated him in the awkward parenting way where you weren't allowed to outright hate your child, just try to undermine them every step of the way instead because they were 'ungrateful' and 'didn't understand the effort that their parents put in'. They were right, he didn't understand. But the bit that he didn't understand was how they thought that they'd put any effort in at all, because they really hadn't.

"Okay, everyone!" Someone pimply and tall with a loud voice called. "I know you all want to get to know each other, but we need you to get into your room groups!" Instantly, everyone began shouting out their room numbers. Link didn't even remember what his was, not that he could shout it out to find his future room mates anyway.

"Um, hello?" A girl came and stood in front of him. She was taller than him, no surprise, and she had bright blonde hair he would bet was dyed because she was rich and bright blue eyes that were looking at him in a strange way. Instantly, he disliked her. On principal, of course, because she was rich and he hated rich people. "I saw you coming out of my room earlier, but I don't know. Were you sent to the wrong place?"

He shook his head and resigned himself to a long and awkward explanation, shifting his notepad into his hands so he could write to her. 'I can't speak,' he started, and to his surprise she nodded without a single look of pity. He no longer hated her, even though it was probably just that she was good at acting. 'I asked to be put in the boys rooms, but they obviously ignored me. I am a boy, though.'

The girl nodded again. "Okay," she said. "What's your name? I'm Zelda. I have a surname too, but I don't want to bother with that kind of thing."

He definitely wasn't going to hate her. Good, because there was no way that he was going to share a room with someone shitty. Not when the school had explicitly gone against his wishes, at least.

'My name is Link,' he wrote, hoping that she didn't laugh at his name like a lot of people had a habit of doing. He really hated it when people dismissed his name choice because it wasn't the usual kind of name people had. When he'd first told his mother, her first response was that it was a terrible name and she would never pick a name like that for 'her little girl'.

"Hang on," Zelda said, "do you know sign language?"

Link nodded, suddenly getting his hopes up. Useless, of course, because barely anyone knew sign language, they just 'thought that it would be cool to learn'. 'I'd communicate in it, but no one ever knows it.'

'I do,' Zelda signed, smiling at him, and okay he actually loved her now, in the not gay (she wasn't even his gender, she didn't qualify), friendly way. They were best friends now, she couldn't stop that. Oh, that made him so happy. Suddenly, he wasn't alone. There was someone he could talk to in the language he had been using all his life and it was great.

'How much?' He asked, just to check. Maybe she only knew the basics. Maybe she only knew the tiniest amount. He couldn't expect her to know as much as he did, because she could talk and she could hear.

'A fair amount,' she signed back. 'My nanny from when I was little had a deaf son and she taught me how to sign to him, but I kept learning it after she stopped looking after me.' It was done with such ease, such confidence, that Link didn't doubt that he would be able to communicate with her without a pen and paper. She was obviously the best room mate he could have ended up with, despite the fact that she was a girl. There probably weren't any boys who understood sign language, and Zelda seemed to be cool with him being a boy, which was a huge relief.

"Excuse me," someone said, and Link turned to see someone who looked rather angry at everything. Their skin was a darker colour that showed they were probably of Sheikah descent (that was when his darling mother would get the curse wards out, he was sure) and their eyes were the classic blood red. "I think I spoke to you earlier when I was coming out of our room." They scowled in the direction of Link, but he got the impression that the person did that to everyone they met, not just him. He was fairly sure that he did the same thing to most people anyway.

"Yes," Zelda said. "You're Sheik, aren't you? It seems the people in charge of rooms in this place may have mixed something up, because Link's also in our room."

Sheik sighed and audibly complained about Hylian cishets ruining everything. Link wanted to laugh very loudly, but he was worried it would attract too much attention if he did.

'Can I introduce you, or would you prefer to write?' Zelda signed to him.

'You can introduce me if you like,' Link said. He could always correct her if she said something wrong, after all.

"Well, Sheik, this is Link," Zelda said. "And from what I can tell, I think we're all going to be fantastic friends."


	3. Getting to know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sheik, Zelda, and Link have their first conversation without prying eyes around them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *phoenix noises* I'm alive!

"I'm sick of hearing all about this school and the facilities," Sheik said. They were back in their room of three after a strictly controlled evening meal and had been informed that they were supposed to get to know each other but not stay up too late. "Tell me stuff about yourselves."

'I'm gay,' Link signed immediately, and Zelda started giggling.

"He said he's gay," Zelda translated to Sheik, who also laughed. "I'm gay too. Please tell me you're gay as well, Sheik, please."

"I don't follow traditional labels," they said, putting on a very posh Hylian accent that wasn't too different to Zelda's. "I'm not gay, I'm gay as fuck."

Link couldn't stop himself from laughing then, but he hated the lurch of fear that came with it. Fuck that. These people were nice and it was okay to laugh around them and they weren't staring. 'I'm more gay because I'm not cis,' he signed, ending the finger spelling by sticking his tongue out at Zelda, who pretended to look offended.

"I'm not sure that's how it works," she said. "He said he's more gay than me because I'm cis."

"That's how it works," Sheik said immediately, shooting a grin over to him. "Sorry Zelda. No cis people allowed."

"But think! If I go out there I'm at the mercy of the heteros. What if one of them asks me how lesbians have sex? I'm not even interested in sex."

"Good point," they said. "You can stay. For now," they said, bringing their voice down by an octave. "You could be valuable in corrupting them, though. That's why I'm here, but I don't cover the lesbian aspect of diversity."

'Are you here to corrupt people?' Link signed, and Zelda took a moment to translate before Sheik replied.

"The government were onto my parents about getting me a proper education. Said I won't be able to get to university if I don't have qualifications and also it's illegal for me to be out of school." They sounded pretty annoyed about it. "But hey, it's an adventure, and they already spent a month changing the school systems to have an other option for gender."

'How did they decide which bedroom you would be in?' He asked, pausing to let Zelda translate. 'I spent weeks lecturing them about my rights but one email from my mother put me here.'

"I have the key to the special disabled toilets," Sheik said, turning round to rummage in their bag, presumably to find it. "But I'm just going to use the toilet that has the shortest queue and doesn't smell quite as bad as the other one." Eventually, they pulled out a key which had 'Sheik's toilet key' written on the label.

"That's sweet," Zelda said, "but you're not disabled, so I don't see why they think it's fair for you to use it."

"I'm just gonna give it to the first nice person I find who wants it," they said. "I was thinking someone who doesn't like public toilets or something. Doesn't really matter, honestly, though maybe I could use it as a safe locked space for drugs?"

"No drugs please," Zelda said instantly. "Rich people and drugs mix really badly and it's even worse in a school where half the teachers probably want to get off their faces every day."

'My parents mixed with drugs makes money,' Link signed. His parents didn't actually hide that they had significant drug dealings, at least not from him. They did other things too, but it was clearly the basis of their wealth.

"Really?" Zelda asked. "He said his parents sell drugs." Sheik looked at him curiously, and he nodded. "You don't, do you? And you don't take them either, I hope."

'I don't,' he told them. 'I did try once but it's not all that great. Also, whenever I do anything my parents get weird about it, and I don't want to be reliant on them for bail or something. Hence, trying not to get into trouble.'

"That makes sense," Sheik said with a shrug. "My parents can be pretty cool. Hylians are just really strange." They winked at both of them. "I for one am looking forward to being the only person in a two mile radius who doesn't have daddy issues."

"You're probably right there," Zelda said with a chuckle. "Rich parents don't seem to know what caring about children is."

"My parents are basically those radical Sheikah who sometimes pop up in very racist documentaries on alternative lifestyles," Sheik said, laughing along with her. Then they put on a heavily exaggerated documentary narration voice. "While most Sheikah still live communally in nomadic tribes, some have attempted to join the big boys in modern society."

Zelda snorted. "Condescending and badly informed! A new high of casual racism." Link grinned, but he didn't try to add anything. He felt welcome in this conversation, but the way he communicated just disrupted the flow of it all. "Hylians really are something sometimes."

"I think you two are prooobably okay," Sheik said, leaning back with their arms behind their head. "If not, then I'm sure I'll have corrupted you by the time I get politely asked to leave."

'I'll be gone before you, I bet,' Link signed, and on hearing what he had said, Sheik raised a single eyebrow. Link practically giggled. 'Teachers are fine with teaching the selectively mute kid, or a trans kid, but they're not so kind when I'm not endlessly grateful for all the opportunities they give me.' It was pretty hard to inject sarcasm into signing sometimes, but Zelda managed to get that across to Sheik pretty well. 'Also, I get into lots of arguments with people that end up as fights because they don't want to wait to listen to me.'

"Straight people are gross," Sheik said. "You'd think that rich people would be more shamefully hiding that they're gay and all that, but even if they are it just means they're arseholes."

"Sad but true," Zelda said. "Well, we're here to shatter their cosy little world view with our aggressive queer existence. Us against the world and all that, right?"

"Us against the world indeed," Sheik replied. In all these years of searching (and being convinced that he'd never find anyone), he'd never felt so comfortable around other people. Suddenly, he didn't think he wanted to get kicked out.


	4. Sunday Mornings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Link wakes up for his first breakfast at the school.

When Link woke up the next morning, the morning sun was streaming through opened curtains. It took him a moment to realise just where he was, and then he realised that he was the only one of the three still in bed. Zelda was sitting in one of the chairs, a book in her hand, and Sheik was nowhere to be seen. "Morning, Link," she said, smiling at him, and sleepily he smiled back. "Sheik went ahead on to breakfast, they said they wanted to go on a walk to explore the woods."

He nodded, managing to pull himself out of bed fairly quickly. He headed to the bathroom to get changed and wash his face to wake himself up a bit more before he headed back in. Zelda was still reading, still waiting for him, but she looked up when he entered. 'We can go down now,' he signed. 'I forgot what time they do food, sorry if it's a bit late.'

'Not at all,' Zelda returned. 'It's barely half eight, and it's Sunday. It's not like anyone's doing anything interesting today.'

'Pretty sure my parents are going to church right now,' he signed. 'So yes, very boring. At least they can't drag me there like they have every other weekend this summer.'

Zelda responded merely by pulling a face. 'My parents are pretty big on that religious stuff,' she signed, 'as you can probably tell by the name.' Link nodded. 'I'm not so much a fan. It's a pretty embarrassing name.'

'You could just choose something else,' Link suggested. 'I know I did.' As they talked, they started making their way down to where breakfast was being served.

'It's embarrassing, but it's mine,' she signed. 'I feel like I own it. Even if it's kind of bad, I just try to not let it define me, I guess.'

Link sort of wished he felt the same way, but he knew he never could and also it was based on an entirely different situation. His birth name was basically irredeemable because of how gendered it was. At this point he just felt disconnected from it, and Zelda was in a different place to that. 'That's good,' he signed. 'I'll admit that's what I thought of when I heard your name, but you being you replaces that.'

'I like to say I'm too gay to be associated with a long dynasty of women with the same name, but that died out because the last one was gay,' she signed with a grin. 'She was an icon.'

Link grinned back, but quickly became unable to answer when he picked up a tray. Contrary to the belief of some people, people who signed could not magically keep signing while holding objects, especially not when said objects required two hands. Without saying much more, they got their breakfast and went to sit down, leaving a small gap between them and the people nearest. Link was used to avoiding conversation by any means possible and this position was a lot more sociable than where he generally sat, but with Zelda he didn't really mind.

"I'm just going to look really rude and basically talk non stop now," Zelda said with a smile. "Mechanical hands should exist. Then it'd be possible to sign and flip people off at the same time." Link very nearly snorted with laughter at that, but he managed to avoid spitting his cereal all over Zelda.

Taking another mouthful and putting his spoon down, he replied. 'I don't think that would be the most useful thing about having more than two hands.'

"Now Link," Zelda said with a wry grin. "Don't talk with your mouth full."

'Fuck you,' he signed with a cheerfully sarcastic smile. He made sure to emphasise that he was chewing at the same time, just because he knew she was joking. 'I do what I want.'

"Surely what you really want is to not have to be here," she said, and after a moment he shrugged. In this moment, being here was quite good. Mostly because he didn't have to talk to annoying rich people at the moment. 

'I'd rather be here with you and Sheik than at home,' he signed. 'It's no fun there and I don't like my parents, as previously established. It's approximately three times more queer here than at home.'

Zelda smiled, and she really did look pleased at that. "I get that," she said. "We just have to work on surviving round here with all the other people." Link felt like pointing out that 'all the other people' were the ones sitting around them right now. He didn't say anything, though, because he was pretty sure that Zelda didn't really care about stuff like that.

Once they were done eating, they headed back up to the room. There, they both made themselves busy in a silence that was far more comfortable than pretty much anything Link had experienced in the past. Zelda read, he unpacked his second suitcase that had all of his books in. They didn't have all that much shelf space so he was pretty sure they were going to have to start improvising very quickly, but for now he organised what he could fit on the top shelf.

"This is pretty nice," Zelda said after a while. Link nodded. "I've always hated Sundays at boarding school, because people always want to go stuff. Roommates would always drag me out of the room and outside, usually to the local town. They didn't take no for an answer."

Link tutted. 'Straight capitalists.' Zelda immediately laughed.

"Actually, I did have a roommate who was full on a communist once," she said. "She was there on scholarship money and I'm pretty sure she was flat out a genius. It was a real shame that it turned out the head was filming the bathrooms and we all went our separate ways after that. The school is still there, I think, but both me and her got pulled out."

'Private schools suck,' Link signed. Zelda nodded. 'Aim for the year is to make sure it doesn't suck this time, I guess.'

"I'm hoping that's as easily done as it is said," Zelda said with a smile. "But even if it still sucks, at least we have some gays to fall back on." Link grinned back at her. Yeah, this was definitely the best school he'd ever attended, and lessons didn't even start until tomorrow.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are appreciated :)


End file.
